Colliding Stars (Minsung)

Chapter 22: Family

(All Credits to the rightful owners.)

Wordcount: 4.3k

Minho P.O.V

*Flashback begins*

I don't know why since that factory boy...well Chipmunk came to live with us, I seem to have this urge to run back home every time I am outside. Just be close to him. Be by his side. But when I do run into him in the hallway outside Yongbok's...well now it's Yongbok and Chipmunk's room, I get absolutely overwhelmed by a jittery feeling doing fireworks in my heart. I feel running away and hiding back in my room.

I am going insane! If I had any idea that all this crazy stuff would be happening when appa told us that an orphaned boy would be coming to live in our house, I would have...well I don't really know what I would have done. This is all so...new.

To be honest when I heard that Chipmunk had lost both his parents, I wanted to go and talk to him. Tell him I know how he feels. Tell him that he isn't alone. That I am right there with him. I always will be.

But instead I found myself consciously avoiding his very sight every second I spent at home. I even started to return home extremely late after everyone had already fallen alseep. I did get reprimandeed by my father for this a lot but he will be going away on another business trip very soon anyway. So, who cares.

One of the nights I had returned home at around 2am. Woo ajumma had to quietly sneak me in inside the house so that I didn't wake up appa and get a scolding from him again. I was just about to climb up the dimly lit stairs to my room when I saw a narrow ray of bright light coming from the downstairs lobby. My father's home office was located there.

Appa never stays awake this late.

For some reason I decided to follow that ray of light. I stopped behind the slightly open door of the office and could hear my father's voice coming from inside. He seemed to be on a call. He sounded agitated.

"We need to show the documents to the child protect service. The boy's school admission will be tricky as well if we don't have a valid birth certificate. But I guess I can deal with that in some other way."

Is he talking about Chipmunk?

"I get that Mr. Davis." Appa continued.

Mr Davis...isn't that appa's secretary?

"But what I don't understand is why would the boy's father, Mr. Oh have a fabricated birth certificate of his own child. The document doesn't even have the father's name on it. And Only Mrs. Han written in the mother's section. Isn't it supposed to be Mrs. Oh instead? The mother is supposedly dead but we have no documents about her, not even a photograph or her death certificate. You said you checked our company's recordings. We barely have any information about Mr. Oh himself. Something doesn't click. Find out who employed him. Also check all the hospitals in Incheon for anything we might find about Jisung and his mother. This is a little boy's life we are dealing with. We can't just sit back knowing his mother might be alive."

What?! My Chipmunk's eomma is alive?

...Wait did I just say "my" Chipmunk?

*Flashback ends*

I didn't like a lot of things about my appa. How he refused to look at me directly at my face for more than a few minutes. How he refused to speak about my eomma even when I asked him about her. How he never really cared, and just abandoned me at every chance he got. Well we never had a good relationship or even a relationship at all to begin with.

But what I did admire about him was his love for Yongbok and his years of attempts to find my Hannie's mother.

Since that day I would often sneak in my father's office late at night and check the files in which he used to keep track of Hannie's background information and anything new he would find about it. One of the major reasons (probably the only one) I took interest in joining the company at an early age was the opportunity to have direct conversations with Mr. Davis on this matter. I requested the man to not tell my appa that I know that he was searching for Hannie's mother. Soon after my appa's death his secretary retired. I took it entirely upon myself to continue with the search, for my Hannie's sake.